The market for professional service robots reached a turnover of 6.7 billion U.S. dollars worldwide (sample method) – up 12% in 2020. At the same time, turnover of new consumer service robots grew 16% to 4.4 billion U.S. dollars. This is according to World Robotics 2021 – Service Robots report, presented by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR).
TOP 5 Application in Service Robotics © World Robotics
“Service robots continued on a successful path proving the tremendous market potential worldwide,” says IFR President Milton Guerry. “Sales of professional service robots rose an impressive 41% to 131,800 units in 2020.”
Five top application trends for professional service robots were driven by extra demand of the global pandemic:
© IFR International Federation of Robotics
One out of three units were built for the transportation of goods or cargo. Turnover for Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) and delivery robots grew by 11% to over 1 billion US dollars. Most units sold operate in indoor environments for production and warehouses. The trend goes towards flexible solutions, so that the AMR´s act in mixed environments together e.g. with forklifts, other mobile robots or humans. There is also a strong market potential for transportation robots in outdoor environments with public traffic, e.g. lastmile delivery. Marketing and monetarization options will depend on the availability of regulatory frameworks which currently still prevent the large-scale deployment of such robots in most countries.
Demand for professional cleaning robots grew by 92% to 34,400 units sold. In response to increasing hygiene requirements due to the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 50 service robot providers developed disinfection robots, spraying disinfectant fluids, or using ultraviolet light. Often, existing mobile robots were modified to serve as disinfection robots. There is a high ongoing potential for disinfection robots in hospitals and other public places. Unit sales of professional floor cleaning robots are expected to grow by double-digit rates on average each year from 2021 to 2024.
In terms of value, the sales of medical robotics accounts for 55% of the total professional service robot turnover in 2020. This was mainly driven by robotic surgery devices, which are the most expensive type in the segment. Turnover increased by 11% to 3.6 billion U.S. dollars.
A tremendously growing number of robots for rehabilitation and non-invasive therapy make this application the largest medical one in terms of units. About 75% of medical robot suppliers are from North America and Europe.
The global pandemic created additional demand for social robots. They help e.g. residents of nursing homes to keep contact with friends and family members in times of social distancing. Communication robots provide information in public environments to avoid personal human contact, connect people via video for a business conference or help with maintanance tasks on the shopfloor.
Hospitality robots enjoy growing popularity generating turnover of 249 million US dollars. Demand for robots for food and drink preparation grew tremendously – turnover almost tripled to 32 million US dollars (+196%). The Covid-19 pandemic created increased awareness to avoid contact with food products. There is still a huge potential for hospitality robots with medium double-digit annual growth predicted.
Robots for domestic tasks are the largest group of consumer robots. Almost 18.5 million units (+6%), worth 4.3 billion US dollars, were sold in 2020.
Robot vacuums and other robots for indoor domestic floor cleaning were up 5% to more than 17.2 million units with a value of 2.4 billion US dollar. This kind of service robot is available in almost every convenience store, making it easily accessible for everyone. Many American, Asian, and European suppliers cater to this market.
Gardening robots usually comprise lawn mowing robots. This market is expected to grow by low double-digit growth rates on average each year in the next few years.
“The service robot industry is developing at a high pace,“ says IFR President Milton Guerry.” “Lots of start-up companies appear every year, developing innovative service robot applications and improving existing concepts. Some of these young companies disappear as quickly as they emerged. The activity remained high in the service robotics space with acquisitions by incumbents and acquisitions by companies from industries with a desire to expand and work in this exciting area.”
Company structure of service robot manufacturers © World Robotics 2021
Worldwide, 80% of the 1.050 service robot suppliers are considered incumbents that were established more than five years ago. 47% of the service robot suppliers are from Europe, 27% from North America and 25% from Asia.
Orders for World Robotics 2021 Industrial Robots and Service Robots reports can be placed online. Further downloads on the content are available here.
Graphs, presentations and German press release are available below:
By Marco Arruda
This is the 1st chapter of the series “Exploring ROS2 with a wheeled robot”. In this episode, we setup our first ROS2 simulation using Gazebo 11. From cloning, compiling and creating a package + launch file to start the simulation!
You’ll learn:
In this series we are using ROS2 foxy, go to this page, create a new rosject selecting ROS2 Foxy distro and and run it.
The first step is to clone the dolly robot package. Open a web shell and execute the following:
cd ~/ros2_ws/src/
git clone https://github.com/chapulina/dolly.git
Source the ROS 2 installation folder and compile the workspace:
source /opt/ros/foxy/setup.bash
cd ~/ros2_ws
colcon build --symlink-install --packages-ignore dolly_ignition
Notice we are ignoring the ignition related package, that’s because we will work only with gazebo simulator.
In order to launch the simulation, we will create the launch file from the scratch. It goes like:
cd ~/ros2_ws/src
ros2 pkg create my_package --build-type ament_cmake --dependencies rclcpp
After that, you must have the new folder my_package in your workspace. Create a new folder to contain launch files and the new launch file as well:
mkdir -p ~/ros2_ws/src/my_package/launch
touch ~/ros2_ws/src/my_package/launch/dolly.launch.py
Copy and paste the following to the new launch file:
import os
from ament_index_python.packages import get_package_share_directory
from launch import LaunchDescription
from launch.actions import DeclareLaunchArgument
from launch.actions import IncludeLaunchDescription
from launch.launch_description_sources import PythonLaunchDescriptionSource
def generate_launch_description():
pkg_gazebo_ros = get_package_share_directory('gazebo_ros')
pkg_dolly_gazebo = get_package_share_directory('dolly_gazebo')
gazebo = IncludeLaunchDescription(
PythonLaunchDescriptionSource(
os.path.join(pkg_gazebo_ros, 'launch', 'gazebo.launch.py')
)
)
return LaunchDescription([
DeclareLaunchArgument(
'world',
default_value=[os.path.join(pkg_dolly_gazebo, 'worlds', 'dolly_empty.world'), ''],
description='SDF world file',
),
gazebo
])
Notice that a launch file returns a LaunchDescription that contains nodes or other launch files.
In this case, we have just included another launch file gazebo.launch.py and changed one of its arguments, the one that stands for the world name: world.
The robot, in that case, is included in the world file, so there is no need to have an extra spawn node, for example.
And append to the end of the file ~/ros2_ws/src/my_package/CMakeLists.txt the following instruction to install the new launch file into the ROS 2 environment:
install(DIRECTORY
launch
DESTINATION share/${PROJECT_NAME}/
)
ament_package()
Use the command below to compile only the created package:
cd ~/ros2_ws/
colcon build --symlink-install --packages-select my_package
source ~/ros2_ws/install/setup.bash
ros2 launch my_package dolly.launch.py
This is how you can launch a simulation in ROS2. It is important to notice that:
In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Tobias Holmes, Quality Assurance Manager at Blue River Technologies. Blue River uses computer vision and robotics in agriculture and was acquired by John Deere in 2017. Tobias speaks about herbicide resistance, spraying weeds, quality assurance and testing on hardware, and on encouraging kids to learn robotics.
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